A Study Of Teacher-initiated Conversational Repair In Junior Middle School English Classroom

Since the late 1970 s,many social linguists have showed strong interest in conversational repair in classroom and many achievements have been made.Repair is a concept of conversational analysis,which refers to dealing with errors and problems that occur during the process of speaking,listening and understanding.Conversational repair is a common phenomenon in daily interactions and it can promote verbal communications between speakers.Furthermore,it will facilitate the language input and output of students if teachers know how to handle conversational repair problems in classroom.However,through reading lots of related literature,it is found in this thesis that although the study of repair under different angles has been fulfilled,the domestic study on conversational repair in English classroom is still in process and only limited achievements have been accomplished.Furthermore,there is little attention paid to the empirical study of teacher-initiated conversational repair.Hence,this paper will target this conversational analysis,combined with qualitative and quantitative study,questionnaire surveys to conduct a further discussion on the conversational repair phenomenon in junior middle school English classroom initiated by teachers,in order to propose some guiding advice to the current middle school English classroom teaching.This study is based on the transcripts of classroom conversations recorded by the author during the internship in Tieshan junior middle school of Huangshi.The recording lasts for 6 hours.After the transcription and analysis of the recording,we come to the conclusions: 1.The conversational repairs in classroom initiated by teachers are divided into four types: teacher self-initiated and teacher self-repair,teacher other-initiated but student self-repair,teacher self-initiated but student other-repair,teacher other-initiated and teacher other-repair,among which teacher self-initiated and teacher self-repair occupies the largest proportion.2.The content of teacher-initiated conversational repairs includes phonetic repairs,lexical repairs,grammatical repairs,discourse repairs.Lexical repairs are used the most frequently,next are discourse repairs,and finally are grammatical repairs and phonetic repairs.3.The repair strategies adopted by the teachers in the classroom are direct repair,meta-lingual instructions,code switching,interpretation and repetition,among which the direct repair strategy is used the most frequently.4.Based on the questionnaire,in terms of phonetic,lexical,grammatical,discourse mistakes,students show a positive attitude to teachers in regard to the repair time,repairer and repair strategies.The study of conversational repair in classroom can not only establish a harmonious relationship between teachers and students but also improve the efficiency of classroom teaching,which is of great significance for students' second language acquisition.Therefore,the author hopes to devote more time and energy to the research of this aspect in the future,to improve people's understanding of the phenomenon of conversational repair in the English classroom.